“... whether or not to break it off. So he sought advice in a distinctively modern way: he wrote to Ruth English, agony aunt of Everybody’s, a weekly tabloid. Advice columns very quickly became common in British newspapers and magazines in the late 1930s. Though the concept of the agony aunt extended as far back as the 17th century, it took the launch of the ...”

“... across Learning Together at HMP Grendon in Buckinghamshire, where he also received therapy for the first time after a lifetime of anxiety and negative feelings about himself, exacerbated by years of addiction and grief over the death of his mother in 1988, when he was 17. The prospect of a job in Cambridge was vague – part-time gardening work at the ...”

“... Will Rogers had hosted a variety show which had gained the largest audience in history. For the first time in nine years, ‘Will Rogers Says’ – the boxed comments that appeared daily in five hundred newspapers – did not appear. Rogers had been featured on the cover of Time; he had been received at the White House by five Presidents. However, unlike ...”

“... one of the few that are still read fifty years on. It was a radical book in its day, and my first political eye-opener was the opposition it met: W.H. Smith refused to sell it at first, and all the national newspapers rejected a full-page advertisement designed by E. McKnight Kauffer, showing a helmeted skeleton with ...”

“... of desolation. Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, Madame Royale, later Duchesse d’Angoulême was the first child of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and the sister of the dauphin, Louis-Charles. All four members of the royal family, together with the king’s sister, Madame Elisabeth, were imprisoned in the Temple, a medieval fortress in the Marais, after the ...”

“... the hope of establishing a rapport with some representatives of the race whom he aims to dignify. First he persuades them to smoke with him in the cow barn, though this is against his mother’s orders. The next day, two cans of milk are returned because they taste of tobacco. Undeterred, Asbury tries out another means of bonding with the incommunicative ...”

“... anyway. An example of Brigid Brophy’s stylishness occurs at the opening of Hackenfeller’s Ape, first published in 1953 and the earliest of these reprints: Radiant and full-leafed, the Park was alive with the murmuring vibration of the species which made it its preserve. The creatures, putting off timidity at the same time as winter drabness, abounded now ...”

“... at once. Not only did she belong to the pioneering generation of women at Cambridge, she was the first Jew to be admitted to Newnham. She was also a precociously gifted writer, whose first volume of poetry appeared before she was twenty; and by the time of her suicide eight years later she had published three short ...”

“... In the first book of the Iliad, Nestor, the oldest by a generation of the Achaean chieftains at the siege of Troy, intervenes in the argument between Agamemnon and Achilles, telling them they should listen to him because You are both younger men than I, and in my time I struck up with better men than you, even you, but never once did they make light of me ...”

“... the participants themselves. Subject to many subsequent redactions, the love story on which they first collaborated would ironically become the two ‘obscure’ poets’ most popular and accessible work. Rather than offer yet another retelling of the myth, Karlin’s book seeks to analyse the process of myth-making, and the psychological and literary needs ...”

“... concerns an invented lost Modernist woman writer. Both Wilson and Dunant specialise in hard-boiled first-person one-liners, which pretend to be hard-bitten and self-deflating but actually shriek ‘Look at me, aren’t I fabulous.’ It is the wit mote than anything which knocks any idea that right-ons are at all socially engaged firmly on the head. With ...”

“... tendency to exacerbate recession has now become orthodoxy on both sides of the Atlantic. In his first State of the Union address, given in January 2010 when his party still had control of both houses of Congress, Obama announced a three-year freeze on non-defence discretionary spending – a move he had called an ‘example of unfair burden sharing’ and ...”

“... Berg would have disagreed exactly. He called these women ‘hookers for Jesus’. Morgan was the first child in her family to be born into the cult. Her father, Arturo, was an amiable con man, forever slipping off on mysterious cult business. Thanks to his wealthy family he enjoyed certain privileges. Although Berg railed against systemite evils ...”

“... of how people ‘cope’ with plural marriages, not why they enter into such arrangements in the first place. Nor do we learn much about the long-term consequences of these marriages: although some children took part in the interviews, Altman and Ginat never seem to have inquired (or to have felt comfortable inquiring) what they bought about their ...”

“... Georgian workhouse has been saved from demolition because it’s reckoned, on evidence detailed by Ruth Richardson in Dickens and the Workhouse, that it must be the most famous workhouse of all – the one in Oliver Twist. The claim isn’t convincing. Oliver Twist’s workhouse is 75 miles north of London and if it ever existed outside Dickens’s imagination ...”